The gadgets of yesterday are often turned into the art of today, and this concept is carried out delightfully in the art of Hu Shaoming. He uses technological relics of the early 20th century to show the internal beauty of the objects’ working parts.

“Reconnecting Time” is a series of four objects: a 1910s telephone, a 1920s alarm clock, a 1930s camera, and a 1940s portable film camera. Each has been painstakingly disassembled.

The artist then reconstructed every piece with a stationary zipper. Rather than pulling apart and putting together pieces of the objects, the zippers serve to reveal their inner mechanisms.

Although the zippers don’t move, they connect the antique gadgets with the present day. They allow for a glimpse into the mechanical parts that made each of the items work – a view that we don’t usually get until we deconstruct an object.

According to the artist, the pieces use the zippers as hands to pull the gadgets from the beginning of industrial age into the present. He destroyed their original forms and then carefully pieced them back together to create something that is neither firmly in the past or the present.

The post Persistence of Time: Antique Gadgets Unzipped for Art first appeared on Gajitz.

These antique cutlery sets may have come in handy the last time someone told you your mashed potatoes were a little on the lumpy side. The set above dates back to 1715 and the scenarios in which it would have been useful are probably lost to time. But using the weapons would require at least a few seconds of forethought since the barrels actually point directly toward the user. To fire them, the user would have to flip them around and aim the handle of the utensil at the intended adversary.

Another set of deadly cutlery ups the stakes (steaks?) a bit by sporting double barrels. One trigger on each meant that both barrels would fire at once, essentially giving the cutlery-holder the ability to fire four bullets in a second’s time. Although the date and place of origin are unknown, this set does at least keep its barrels pointed away from the user at all times. We are loathe to point out the obvious, but aren’t knives and spear-like forks like these deadly enough on their own?

(via: Douglas Self’s Museum of Retro Technology)

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It’s hard to avoid feeling some sort of nostalgia for the toys and tools we became used to as children. In the 80s and 90s, technology experienced a huge boom – and as it quickly progressed, technology waste likewise increased exponentially. The planet is overrun with obsolete objects like floppy disks, outdated cell phones, cassettes and untold amounts of other e-waste.

Photographer Jim Golden was inspired to document these disappearing relics when he saw an ancient brick-style cellular phone in a thrift shop. After that find, he began collecting other old “junk” from friends, thrift stores and eBay. He was fascinated by the objects both because of their nostalgia value and the curiosity he felt about what may have happened to all of the wasted objects.

Golden made some of his photos into GIFs that further illustrate the former usefulness of these now-outdated pieces of technology. If you are young enough to never have lived when these things were the standard, these GIFs might be the closest you’ll ever get to using a projector, reel-to-reel tape recorder, or rotary phone.

The photographer put the obsolete technology against plain institutional-type colors. While they were minimally retouched (most of them were in unused condition), Golden did use editing software to create some of the stacked patterns. Golden says of the Relics of Technology project: “These photos are reminders that progress has a price and our efforts have an expiration date.”

The post Our Technological History: Photos of Obsolete Technology first appeared on Gajitz.

Who doesn’t have a few outdated smartphones just lying around the house? An Android app called Dormi takes your obsolete devices and turns them into internet-connected baby monitors. The app works on phones and tablets running Android v. 2.3 or later to give parents the peace of mind that they get from baby monitors, but without the crazy cost.

Using the devices’ speaker, microphone and internet capabilities, the app lets you put one device in the baby’s room and use your own phone or tablet (presumably a modern, non-obsolete one) as the other half of the set. In fact, you can even add on more devices if you need to monitor more than one room at a time. Multiple parent devices can connect to the child device so a pair of parents can listen in on what’s happening in baby’s room.

Your own device can be used as an intercom to let you communicate with your other Dormi-enabled devices. Or you can simply use it to listen to the child devices – it activates automatically when a child cries, or you can push a button to listen at any time. The app is an eco-friendly alternative to getting rid of your old devices – and a wallet-friendly alternative to splashing out on a whole new baby monitor. While the basic app only allows four hours of monitoring per month, you can get unlimited lifetime monitoring for a very reasonable $7.

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When office products outlive their usefulness, they usually end up being tossed and quickly forgotten. But a new commercial from Japanese/British electronics manufacturer Brother has 97 obsolete office gadgets making an encore appearance as a junkyard orchestra, singing a Bob Dylan song in beautiful technological voices.

The video was put together by London creative agency Is This Good? for Brother. A team, led by director Chris Cairns and composer Will Cohen, tweaked and tuned and hacked the old Brother gadgets to take them from old gadgets to functional instruments.

Despite looking so cool that it seems impossible, the symphony is 100 percent authentic. The team worked on the project for a month, getting every device to make just the right sound to sing Bob Dylan’s classic “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” The finished commercial is absolutely stunning, especially for people who remember using some of these printers, scanners and copiers when they were at the cutting edge of office technology.

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